Twitter Study: TV Shows Get A Big Follower Boost From Live-Tweeting Broadcasts

Tweet more, get more Twitter followers and spark more conversation.

It’s not quite that simple, but no doubt there’s a correlation between high activity on Twitter and building an audience there. And if you send those tweets when that audience is prone to be listening? Expect your growth and engagement to be higher.

So while it’s not especially noteworthy that Twitter confirmed that television shows that live-tweet during broadcasts experience strong follower growth, it’s interesting to see just how much it helps. And the extra lift created when tweets come from humans as opposed to brand accounts.

Twitter’s release of results of the study today was timed to coincide with this month’s start of the fall TV season in the United States. The company, obviously hoping to encourage more activity by broadcasters, found plenty of supporting evidence.

Looking at two groups of television programs from last season, one of shows that live-tweeted, the other that didn’t, Twitter discovered shows that had cast members live-tweeting during the premiere generated 64% more tweets about the show that day. For shows that live-tweeted from the show’s official handle boosted tweets by 7%.

The results were similar when considering follower growth over the TV season:

Besides increasing the volume of Tweets about a show, live-Tweeting can contribute to building an audience on Twitter. When a program is on the air, there is a 6.5x lift in follow rate for the show’s official account when they don’t live-Tweet. When a show does live-Tweet, that increases 15%, to 7.5x. For a cast, their accounts go from a 3.7x lift in follow rate when they don’t live-Tweet to 12.2x — a 228% increase.

Twitter also broke the follower-growth results down by genre. Not surprisingly, live-tweeting casts of comedy and science fiction shows had the highest percentage increase (405%) of growth compared to non-live-tweeters. In all cases, tweets from real people were correlated with higher follower growth than tweets from official show accounts. Twitter created an infographic that shows the breakdowns: